Expressive Versus Instrumental Partisanship in Multiparty European Systems

Abstract

Partisanship has a powerful influence on political behavior in the United States, but its influence is less certain in European democracies. Part of the debate concerning the influence of partisanship in Europe centers on its nature. From one perspective, partisanship is seen as grounded in factors such as ratings of government performance and agreement with the party's issue stances. We refer to this as the instrumental model. In the United States, however, a competing model has gained empirical support in which partisanship is defined as an identity that is largely defensive in nature and not especially reactive to ongoing events. We refer to this as an expressive model. In this review, we focus on several European democracies (the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy) and evaluate evidence for and against an expressive model of partisanship in which democratic citizens act to defend their party in order to maintain its positive standing. We find evidence that strong partisans in Europe exhibit five characteristics of expressive partisans: stable partisan identity, motivated reasoning in defense of the party, the greater influence of identity than issues and ideology in shaping vote choice and political behavior, affective polarization bias in favor of one's own party, and the existence of strong defensive emotions aroused by partisan threats and reassurances. It appears that partisans in the four European democracies act in similar ways to partisans in the United States. Nonetheless, levels of partisan identification differ across the European nations and between European nations and the United States helping to explain national differences in the intensity of partisan behavior.

The dual nature of partisan prejudice: Morality and identity in a multiparty system

“…Our results dovetail with recent evidence that partisan prejudice is dual in nature (Garrett & Bankert, 2018). Although both partisan identification and ideological disagreement strongly predicted hostility, these effects appeared to be largely independent—a finding that accords with the literature on expressive partisanship ([10], [11]) and also predicts the compounding effect of sorting [26], whereby prejudice should be aggravated as ideologues acquire stronger partisan inclinations.…”

“…Existing work describing the origins of prejudice toward opposing political parties has supplied two distinct explanations. One of these is centered on the importance of partisan attachment and identity [10], [11] [12], [13], [14], [15], while the other focuses on the role of prescriptive disagreement in ethical and policy issues [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23]). We summarize these distinct bodies of evidence in Section 1.1, before turning to the main innovations of our approach.…”

“…A sense of partisan attachment appears to mobilize voters to a greater extent than ideological syntony, as documented by studies of voting behavior and campaign involvement [10], [12]. Stronger partisan identities also magnify feelings of anger toward rival-party supporters [15] at the prospect of electoral loss, while predicting enthusiasm and overconfidence in electoral victory [11], [12]. Collectively, these studies open up the possibility that growing partisan prejudice is driven not by real or perceived division on concrete policy questions, but by primitive instincts propelling identity-based opposition.…”

Yikes! Are we disgusted by politicians?

“…In a time of increasing affective polarization (Iyengar et al, 2012;Westwood et al, 2018), a large part of the population strongly identifies with a political in-party (e.g., Democratic) and therefore also has a specific other political out-party (e.g., Republican) (Huddy et al, 2015). Despite our examples, strong positive feelings for the political in-party and strong negative feelings for the political out-party are not uniquely American but are pervasive in Europe, too (Bakker, Lelkes, & Malka, 2020;Bankert et al, 2017;Huddy et al, 2018;Westwood et al, 2018). Because of these strong identities, disgust responses to out-party politicians are perhaps almost baked in because they-and their party-are so often criticized for moral transgressions by the in-party.…”

‘The enemy within’: Campaign attention and motivated reasoning in voter perceptions of intra-party conflict

“…In accordance with many existing theoretical accounts of partisan identification, we define partisanship as an enduring, persistent sentiment towards the party that is unlikely to change during the short time span of an election campaign (e.g. Bartels, 2002;Huddy et al, 2018). 4 In all regression models, we control for a series of variables that the existing literature suggests can influence voters' perceptions of intra-party conflict.…”